Category: The Future of Work

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Freelancers can help you grow your company faster. You will focus on service quality and better resource allocation rather than HR and employee training. Freelancers eliminate the traditional HR costs such as benefits, onboarding and training and general productivity loss.

Hire task-focused labour

Many companies grow slower or fail because they spend their early resources on employees and HR-related expenses. Some business managers prefer to stick to the traditional organizational structure by overstaffing their companies. Other successful rapid-growth companies prefer to divert their focus to their bottom line first and value creation for their customers.

Ask yourself – Do I need to a hire a full-time marketing graduate and train them (time friction) to use basic photo editing tools? or is it more cost effective to hire two overqualified freelancers who can finish their assignment in less time and ultimately deliver value (good logo, frequent social engagement) to my customers? Do idle training hours contribute directly to my core activity as a business?

Thanks to freelance jobs marketplaces such as Nabbesh.com or other competitors in other markets, you can fill in a vacant position or a specific task or a project in the same day. Extended HR services such as assisted recruitment will choose the best talent for your tasks.

Focus on long-term strategy, & execute faster.

One of the reasons some managers hire full-timers (sometimes too many) is that they rely on their specialized team to figure out their own mini-strategy within the broad company strategy. This is especially true of small businesses and startups. The truth is not every new hire has the ready capacity to understand the business or growth model they work within. It is best not to hire people to think for you. If you’re short of cash, you are not hiring the most qualified talent in the market, but someone who understands the requirements of the job. That’s not enough to outgrow your competitors before they drive you out of market.

You can choose to outsource non-core tasks and focus instead on strategy and execution. Hire talent for competency and not presumed necessity. A popular Silicon Valley saying reads: “hire people who are more qualified than you are.” At least, your team won’t be at fault when you fail to execute your strategy or grow. You will know where to grow.

Freelance job marketplaces offer easy tools to vet freelancers’ skills and professional precedence with on-website rankings and social profile spaces. Nabbesh’s assisted recruitment services will shortlist highly skilled talented for prospective employers semi-manually and algorithmically. This is how Nabbesh scales its own business.

Allocate freed resources to core activity

Throwing the appropriate cash or resources at your core activities will help you scale your business faster. You may choose to free cash from marketing and allocate it to direct sales because it directly results in more revenues. Thanks to task-focused freelancers, you won’t have to give up on marketing fully, but rather hire people who execute the same job tasks at lesser HR expenses.

You may want to spend more on marketing or customer satisfaction only when you acquire new customers. Spend less and do more. This is how freelancers can help you grow your company fast and stay on the competitive edge.

The author of this article is a remote worker. You can hire Ahmed for your job by inviting him to send a proposal.

Finding great talent that understands your needs is one of the most challenging tasks an entrepreneur faces on a daily basis.

Hiring freelancers is brilliant for temporary projects and testing new ideas when you’re growing a business. Freelancers can relieve labour constraints to do more without committing your company’s revenues to new full-time salaries. They can execute specific tasks while you focus on plans and strategy – sounds great, yes?

What jobs should freelancers do?

It is usually advised not to hire freelancers for a job that would have been otherwise filled by a full-time salaried worker. Throwing too many tasks at a freelancer (even if adequately compensated) without including them in team strategy and team dynamics will lead to bad synergy. Be specific about the nature of the job and level of commitment you require from your freelancers.

Don’t hire freelancers for core jobs you cannot absolutely do or don’t know much about especially if the job is complex. It’s essential that you and the newly hired freelancer speak the same language (figuratively) and can meet on specific task accomplishments. Instead, hire for jobs you can do, but don’t have time to. Your knowledge and experience with the job will help you set specific goal metrics for the new freelancer and ultimately cut a fine a line between failure and success. In other words, you will know if you hired the right skills to fill the right job. How much did it take to get the job done? What problems did you run into? The feedback and observations you will make will help make better recruitment choices once you’re ready to expand your team and operations.

How to write a stellar job position

Keep it short

Freelancers are constantly looking for new jobs and more revenues. Make it easier for them to grasp the job responsibilities and your business model by writing less and saying more. Do include specific tasks to be fulfilled, goals to be achieved and a brief line about the company (product, size, industry…). If you’re looking for answers for a problem of yours, ask for a proposal. Put it up front. The applicants won’t miss it.

Add the right skills

When posting a job position on Nabbesh.com, we will ask you to add skills that will help us direct you towards the best talent on our platform. This feature will help us categorize your job description to attract the right talent for your business. Vague skills will result in a flood of applications.

Responsibilities/results

This is the most important section of your job position. Be clear about the nature of the job and the results you’re looking for. Discourage unqualified freelancers to apply or screen applications with a specific question they all have to answer. Other screening questions are previous relevant experience and previous sample work. Set approximate goals to introduce your freelancers to the work ahead of them.

There are multiple ways going freelance can empower young people. Whether you are looking to fill up your free time with a couple of challenging tasks or break the routine that has been dictating your life, a challenging freelance project can make for an exciting experience whose lessons could stay with you forever.

The financial benefit

I don’t blame you if when you say, see, hear or read the word “job”, the first thing you think of is “how much?” We all work to make money—at least the vast majority of people. The flexible nature of freelance work and the fact that most projects are short-term could lead to a freelancer being paid higher rates than those a full-timer would be receiving for doing the same exact job. Looking for freelance work might be your best option if you’re a university student looking to make some pocket money while still having some extra time to do homework, read, or go out with friends. While some worry that freelance might not be a stable prospect in the long run, a bigger number of clients—and more projects—can ensure an almost-stable flow of income. Perhaps one of the best advantages of being a freelancer is the fact that you usually don’t have too many expenses — make sure to inform the client beforehand if you need to go to the field, travel, or buy material, and make sure to make sure they will cover the expenses. Starting to make money at a young age leads to financial independence, and the latter not only liberates you, but also empowers you.

Developing skills before you hit the marketplace

Although you might choose to go exclusively freelance and never have to spend time in an office ever again, you might also decide to accept a full-time job offer at a certain point. Regardless of the professional direction you deem fit, it is crucial that you start working on acquiring and developing basic skills so that when you hit the marketplace, you do so running. Freelance work can complement your studies in a way that classes and professors can only talk about—theoretically, for the most part. Marketing yourself as the right person for the job, agreeing with clients on the terms and conditions of a task, delivering, reviewing and finding quick, effective solutions to overcome daily obstacles are all activities you would have to do on an almost-daily basis while freelancing your way through the pre-career phase of your life. More know-how and a set of social skills is bound to empower you, maybe not overnight, but most definitely somewhere down the line.

Staying ahead of the curve

Competition is fierce out there. It’s a cut-throat job hunt that could leave many scarred for life, especially if you’re one of those people who get their hopes a bit too high a bit too fast. Although you will most probably be scanning the market for entry-level positions upon graduating from university (or high school if you’re too eager), all employers will ask you to submit both a CV and a cover letter, and they usually expect neither to be blank. Being a freelancer is in many ways similar to doing an internship at home. Only difference is: you would actually be doing work! By the time you decide to apply for more senior, higher-paying positions, you would have managed to learn and achieve more than your peers of the same age.

Several Fortune 500 corporations hire remotely. They’re the likes of Walmart, Nintendo, Time Warner Cable, Bloomberg, GoPro and more. They understand the cost benefits of hiring remote workers and its direct consequences in their HR departments. Remote recruitment open room for payroll cuts, lower job turnover and more engagement.

Workers may choose remote jobs and communications for a multitude of reasons. Remote workers can attest to higher levels of productivity, life/work balance and a higher job satisfaction.

Hiring remotely is not a new phenomena. In fact, you’re pretty late to the game! In the U.S. alone,

remote work opportunities have increased 800 percent since 2005. A 2012 SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) survey indicates that the main reasons for remote recruitment are global expansion and boosting productivity (53% and 49 % percent of all respondents respectively).

Cut your payroll!

The global job market is now accessible through remote job marketplaces such as UpWork (North America), Nabbesh.com (Middle East) or Freelancer (Australia). These marketplaces are highly competitive. You can hire qualified workers within your budget who will do the same exact job as any other nine-to-fivers among your local talent pool. You will also pay less overheads by having less people in the main office. You will save a ton in office rent, significantly in rent-hike cities such as Dubai, Cairo, London, San Francisco and several other cities around the world.

Remote workers have helped redefine working hours from a regular 9 to 5 to a delivery time that starts at “assignment” and ends at “due date.” Save on wages by hiring workers who can deliver work outside of traditional office hours. Don’t pay them for idle hours spent at the office. They don’t want the money.

Scale your talent pool on demand

Chances are you’re in a city that makes sense for your business, but doesn’t provide enough new talent for your company’s sustainability. This is typical for smaller cities with small dwelling population or universities. You can hire the finest workers outside of your immediate locality either in your country or overseas. Remote work is a great option for talented workers who do not wish to move to new cities big or small alike for many reasons. The news is – you don’t have to comprise on skills anymore. Moms are a chief example of remote workers who can’t always change locations because of family commitments.

Grow your business faster

There are a few tech companies that are 50+ percent remote. This means that more than half of their employees are distributed across several regions and several times zones. An internationally distributed team is able to work around the clock. Remote workers are a great resource for rapid-growth companies who wish to expand to new markets. Hiring locally will cost you less than opening a new office and sending expatriate supervisors to oversee work. Local (remote) workers are proficient in the local language, culture, and business customs. You won’t be lost in translation.

Keep your employees motivated

Remote workers exhibit a higher work motivation than regular on-site workers. If you think about it, remote workers don’t have to deal with daily commutes or traditionally confined work spaces. Plus, despite the new trend, remote jobs are not abundant. If your new recruit professes their desire not only to work at your company, but to do so remotely, they are probably not going to leave you any time soon for their old nine to five job. Remote workers stick longer if the work conditions you provide are ideal for them. Higher job retention will help you save money on new recruitment and will ultimately lead to better work and service to your customers.

The author of this article is a remote worker. You can hire Ahmed for your job by inviting him to send a proposal.

The path to freelancing isn’t necessarily a straight one. People turn to freelancing at various junctures in their lives but one thing is for sure, it is always an option. Freelancing simply means that you are not committed to one employer and you get to “choose” what you want to work on, at a time that works for you.

Becoming a freelancer in the Middle East can be challenging since we still lack the “freelance” mindset and the infrastructure to support freelancers is somewhat nascent. Building on our experience at Nabbesh.com, we offer you 4 tips to get started!

Make sure you love what you do: Freelancing is a long and often lonely path, it is one thing to muster the motivation get started but the real test starts when you hit your first road block and whether or not you will have the resilience to keep going. When you are passionate about your work, you will go the extra mile to present your skills in the most professional way, you will take ownership of your work and the promises you make to clients and you will certainly start reaping the results when your clients start raving about you! Success won’t happen over night, but if you love your work, it most certainly will.

Know the value of your work:Start by researching the market before you price your services. It could be as simple as asking friends and colleagues, or approaching potential clients to get an idea about budgets. Have a clear price range in mind and negotiate within that range. Setting low prices can hurt your income and demotivate you while setting high prices may drive clients away. If this is your first attempt at freelancing, be willing to take on a few jobs at a discount in order to to get the ball rolling and give you momentum but be clear with your clients and let them know that this is an introductory offer!

Choose the right platform to get started:Freelancing is no longer dependent on your circle of family and friends, you have at your disposal several local and global “online work” marketplaces to get you started! A marketplace drastically increases your exposure to a wide network of clients and provides you with a steady stream of projects/ jobs that you can choose from. Decide which marketplace is the right one for you, factors include your skills and level of experience, your preferred type of client, your preferred method of work i.e. do you want on-site projects or pure virtual work? Once you make the decision, spend some time building a quality profile as most marketplaces have algorithms that provide more visibility to freelancers with quality profiles versus bad or incomplete profiles.

Build your reputation:We could not stress how important this is! Marketplaces like Nabbesh.com offer a rating & review mechanism for you to start building your online reputation. This tool provides an unbiased assessment of your work and clients will consider it when they are assessing different applicants. If you were to hire someone to do a simple task, wouldn’t you want to hire the person with the best reviews? How about if you were a company looking to hire an expert for a $5000 project? Your reputation is not only your gateway to more work, but it also means better clients and higher value projects.

Online work marketplaces have taken freelancing to the next level! It is now easy and safe for anyone with an internet connection to get access to thousands if not millions of potential clients and start earning an income fast!

Do you have freelancing stories you would like to share? Then write us at contact@nabbesh.com

“My dream is to have a source of income to cover my basic needs without the need to rely on my family or others but by relying on only myself,” Fatma Alqarra, a 25-year-old from Khan Younis in the Gaza strip, told me.

Last April I hired Fatma online via Nabbesh.com, an online work marketplace I co-founded with my Syrian partner, Rima Al Sheikh in 2012. I was looking for someone to translate a blog post and Fatma had the experience to do the job: she had been doing translation and content writing for a while and she delivered great work. Only later did I discover that her degree was actually in computer engineering — a field where she’d been unable to find a job living in Gaza. “This is the state of all students after graduation” she said.

This is a guest post from Naila Missous, a writer and a translator of Arabic, French and English. Find her tweeting at @N_MissousKadry or hire her on Nabbesh

Translation is an art: yes, an art. In order to get from one language, to the other, and convey the same message, one must hold close the message yet seamlessly glide from the original language to the target language.

The modern day translator seems to have every tool at his or her fingertips. From online resources, dictionaries and dictation software, what could possibly go wrong?

The languages of Arabic and English belong to two different settings and different language families. Arabic is classified as a member of the Semitic family of languages, English as a member of the Indo-European language family. Arabic is defined here as the official language spoken in more than 15 countries in the Middle East. English is an Indo-European language and the official language of Britain, the United States, and most of the commonwealth countries. Syntactically, Arabic and English exhibit different word orders. Arabic is, for the most part, a synthetic language. Phonologically, Arabic and English have different phonemic inventories. And I could go on.

Translation is one of the most difficult and slippery areas within the realm of languages. It’s a mix of interpretation, as well as being concise in the delivery of the message. One of its difficulties lies in that understanding the linguistic units is not enough to translate successfully. Not everyone who is a native speaker of English can translate into English, and the same goes for Arabic. That is to say, the grammatical rules would be of no help and may be useless if the rules of use are not taken into consideration. It’s a lot more than translating from one word to another, but more a grounding in both languages.

The problem lies in that some native speakers think that having the language alone will make them a novice translator. Often many overlook the fact that translation is an act of communication which calls upon both language appropriate use and correct usage in order to reach an acceptable and agreeable translation. That means Google translate will never get it quite right!

Our job, as the “middle man” between Arabic and English is not by any means, to disregard the culture of either the source or the target text when translating since there is no clear cut delimitation between language and culture. This entails that pragmatics heavily influences the translation “validity” and, therefore, professional and even novice translators are required to take into consideration the pragmatic aspects in order to promote their performance. Words that don’t exist in one language, social ideas that can’t be expressed into the other language and so forth all have to be considered in order to produce a valid piece of translation.

On top of that, many clients looking for Arabic translators these days also specify who their audience is, and in what region of the Arabic speaking world. That means that some want their document or website to be translated into an Arabic that a Gulf audience will understand, or Egyptian and so forth. Though many variants of Arabic are not written directly in script (for example that of Algeria, Tunisia etc), some translators do cater to very specific jobs. Again, this all comes down to the skills, talent and fluency in various Arabic forms by the translator.

As with any job, the difficulties are overshadowed by the completed task and the end result. The job allows you to exercise your language skills, as well as the cultural aspects of knowing a language, not just speaking it. We are usually better informed and can adapt this into the translation; engaging in not only the beauty of a language, but the people who use it, too. We are able to read foreign newspapers, or even watch news on TV in the given languages.

And that is a major advantage these days. To me, it will always be a positive to be able to move from one language to the next: each translation jobs offers new vocabulary to be learnt, news ways of writing and new connections.
Arabic is one word that covers a region and language that needs a dictionary to portray it.